How can I explain this feeling I'm feeling right now? I started senior year with so much anxiety and fear. Going into the dorms and starting Kairos, I felt so... inadequate. And as the year went on, so many times that I saw my sins, my failures. I saw how blind I was to myself, saw how little my heart was, saw how self-absorbed, lazy, and uncaring I could be. Just looking back all four years of college, I see how full of myself I was, how little I did for anyone, how much I wish I could go back to that person and tell her the truth. How even now, I'm such a small, self-interested person.
And yet tonight, like... I don't know if any of that was for me. I don't deserve any of that. I wonder if my words and actions really got through. I wonder how they could, when I feel like I've done so little.
Yet I feel like I've done so much. I labored over them. It was as if my peers and leaders and I were fighting this great battle to win back the prisoners held captive by the enemy side (we really were, really). I think a staff member during Winter Retreat put it well: it's like trying to hang onto them and anchor them while the raging wind is threatening to blow them away. Just praying for them, accepting their rejections, hoping they'll accept next time, just... how many times I felt defeated, that all our work would come out to nothing. Just hoping with our hearts bare for some sort of breakthrough. And in the midst of all that, wondering how is it that a person like me could take part in something like this?
I look at all that, and I'm so amazed. This. THIS is the irreplaceable, stunning, unbelievably amazing work of the Gospel. How unworthy I am to struggle for this cause and yet find myself so caught up in it and being able to receive all this love and gratitude.
If I knew, when I started this blog, when I started all this my freshmen year, that I would somehow end this college experience in this way, I... I don't know. I never would have guessed. God has taken me so far and shown me so much. God, this... THIS Gospel, THIS work, THIS cross, THIS GOD, who is SO GOOD. It is my treasure. And it's worth it and so much more.
How could I even dare to think I could live my life otherwise? Sadly, how often that I do. That in my sinful ways, I'm so prone to walk that road to Emmaus. But, again in these moments of clarity, do I come back. And here, I will end my college career, and this blog, on this note:
God is good, so very good.
"Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." - 1 Corinthians 15:58
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